Collection Publications: Esteban Vicente

It is tempting to link the [1960's] work of Esteban Vicente with his early academic training in Spain. Yet, looking at his‚—¶oils and collages, one finds it hard to imagine the artist drawing from casts in Madrid's School of Fine Arts. One is not surprised, however, to hear of his attraction to a group of works by Goya, each limited to four colors. The style by which we know him today related most easily to the ambiance of Paris in the Twenties, where he became deeply involved with the works of Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse; and in certain of the later collages, with their shifting parallelisms, rectilinear adjustments and linear accents, we sense the influence of the Cubists as well. More broadly European is his impeccable sense of métier, his sensibility; yet neither his paintings nor his collages soften into the seductiveness that marks the Ecole de Paris: their cubist understructure is too solid. Perhaps also after his arrival in New York, the mood of that city in the Forties and Fifties, the raw pictorial jabs and thrusts of his friends de Kooning and Kline cut into his European cultivation. Vicente's innate and stubborn attention to medium, structure and economy led to the characteristic vigorous elegance that Thomas Hess called his "masked thought, the invisibility of sweat and muscle." It is unnecessary to consider the paintings and collages separately. The collagist was born, indeed, only by necessity, when, in Berkley, California on a Sunday afternoon early in the 1950's, with no brushed or pigment at hand Vicente was forced to tear up and rearrange colored illustrations in order to work. Even now he thinks of a collage as a study for future paintings. In the works of the Sixties, large, rigorously hewn shapes touch, overlap and interlock in clear, harmonies. Although Vicente (like most Spanish painters) is drawn more to the figure than to landscape, the large areas of tan, orange, blue, of soft whites and wonderfully deep browns and blacks brings landscapes to mind‚—a result of an effect of largeness, of immensely subtle, almost atmospheric edging, and the deep space that the planes of color, despite their flatness, hollow out. Vicente's achievement is unique in his collages. Although they can surely be called paintings and have nothing to do with the tradition of assemblage, the identity of the pasted papers (which he paints beforehand in chosen colors) is retained. A torn edge, often surprisingly like a brushstroke, is allowed to curl or peel from the surface, calling attention to the pasted skin so unlike oil paint. The scissor-cuts also emphasize the medium by their sharpness. Vicente differs from other artist of the New York School in his willingness to submerge his personal life in the pursuit of painting as a sufficient end. Painting, he feels, "should be independent, detached from personality." He has said: "The problem of painting in all times has been to achieve clarity, but clarity is a subjective force. It is realized when the maximum of meaning is obtained with the minimum of elements."

--William C. Seitz, Brandeis University, March 1966